some seal upon her mouth, and she sobbed out: "It's when the
boy touches me with a stick that I can't bear it!"

"What boy did that?"

"I think it was Ned Turk. When I was stoned down Roothing High Street."

"Mother, mother. Tell me about that."

She wailed out everything, while the hand that held hers gradually
became wet with sweat. At the end of her telling she drew her hair
across her face and looked up at him through it. "Have I lost him?" she
wondered. "Harry did not like me so much after horrible things had
happened to me." Then as she looked at him her heart leaped at the sight
of his beauty and his young maleness, and she cried out to herself,
"Well, whether I have lost him or not, I have borne him!"

But she had him always, for presently he bent forward and laid his face
against her hand, and began to kiss it. Then he pulled himself up and
sat hunched as if the story he had heard were a foe that might leap at
him, and almost shouted in his queer voice, which was now breaking,
"Mother, I would like to kill them all! Oh, you poor little mother! I
love you so, I love you so...." He buried his face in the clothes for
one instant and seemed about to weep, and then, conscious of her tears,
slipped his arm behind her and raised her up, and covered her with
kisses, and muttered little loving, comforting things. She crooned with
relief, and until the sky began to lighten and she had to send him back
to bed, sobbed out all the misery she had so long kept to herself. He
did not want to go. That she liked also; and afterwards she slipped
softly into dreamless sleep.

Yet strangely, for surely it was right that a mother should be solaced
by her son? There shot through her mind just before she slept a pang of
guilt as if she had done some act as sensual as bruising ripe grapes
against her mouth. How can one know what to do in this life? Surely it
is so natural to escape out of hell that it cannot be unlawful; and by
calling "Richard! Richard!" she could now bring her worst and longest
dream to an end. Surely she had the right to make Richard love her; and
she knew that by the disclosure of her present and past agonies she was
binding his manhood to her as she had bound his boyhood and his
childhood. Yet after every time that she had called him to save her from
a bad dream she had this conviction of guilt. She could not understand
what it meant. It was partly born of her uneasy sense that in these
nights she was unwil